Consumers Benefit From B.I. Solution at LowerMyBills.com

The Internet is rapidly shifting from an independent business platform for entrepreneurs to a strategic channel for communications and commerce, allowing companies to transform business operations and improve corporate performance. Utilizing the Internet as a business platform requires that enterprises have a clear understanding of customer impact and a demonstrable return-on-investment to validate expenditures on Internet-related initiatives. NetAcumen provides software applications and services to quickly and cost-effectively enable companies to measure and improve the business performance of their Internet-related operations and better utilize the Internet channel across their enterprise. Examples of business-critical metrics provided by the NetAcumen solution include: relative profitability of marketing campaigns; efficiency and effectiveness of on-line service and support offerings; and web site usage by target audiences. The case study below illustrates one customer’s success with the NetAcumen Solution.

LowerMyBills.com is the first independent and unbiased online service to provide visitors with a free, one-stop solution to find the lowest rates and most competitive plans for all their monthly bills. Visitors can research, compare prices, and switch plans for long distance and wireless phone services, Internet service providers, credit cards, loans, insurance providers, and public utilities.

Scaling for Growth

LowerMyBills.com’s business depends on rapidly delivering the right customers to its best partners. That means optimizing incoming traffic, maximizing conversion rates, and improving product selection on the web site.

LowerMyBills.com tried using basic web reporting tools on top of its existing system, but was disappointed by the results. “We needed to scale our reporting system to handle the volume and complexity of our operations,” says Olivier Chaine, vice president of operations. “NetAcumen gave us that power and scalability.”

According to Chaine, LowerMyBills.com evaluated products from numerous competitors before deciding on NetAcumen. LowerMyBills.com choose NetAcumen for its onsite hosting capabilities, easy access to reports through the NetAcumen portal, support for custom business rules, and integration with external data. “NetAcumen was the only solution that gave us the level of service and functionality we needed. They provided a true data warehousing foundation that could integrate the clickstream behavior with our enterprise systems, bridging from marketing to fulfillment.” Chaine was also impressed by the “commitment to excellence in customer service” provided by NetAcumen’s operations department.

New Opportunities

NetAcumen gave LowerMyBills.com a flexible and extensible data warehouse of web log information that integrates clickstream data with transactional and authentication information stored in Oracle 8i. LowerMyBills.com has additional plans to integrate with CRM and marketing automation data in the future.

“At LowerMyBills.com, we are constantly working to improve our campaign effectiveness and conversion rates. NetAcumen allows us to quickly focus on modifications that are helping our visitors convert and identify those that are not,” observes Chaine. “For example, there was tremendous interest in our debt solutions area; NetAcumen helped us discover that we were losing many people because our pages were confusing. We redesigned the page and have since doubled our conversion rate in this area.”

Demonstrable Results

LowerMyBills.com delivers web reports from NetAcumen to 60% of its employees. These reports are created by the data warehousing group, then made available to users as part of an information portal. “NetAcumen helped us integrate key reports into a portal for use by everyone in the company, giving us a true, cross-organizational view of our data,” says Chaine. Users of the system include employees in business development, IT, marketing, web development, sales, and even the CEO, who uses the reports to monitor key performance indicators and prepare for board meetings.

NetAcumen has helped LowerMyBills.com improve the performance of its affiliate program by over 20% percent, increase banner advertising effectiveness by 45%, and save $20,000 on one recent campaign. Says Chaine: “Our previous solution only provided traffic information, such as page hits. This information was of little value in helping us improve our conversion rate. The NetAcumen architecture allows us to quickly integrate both operational and third party demographic data that is critical to understanding our customers and increasing revenue.”

Founded in 1999, NetAcumen is a leading provider of Internet channel business performance metrics to Global 2000 companies. The NetAcumen Solution integrates information from web sites, internal corporate databases and third party data sources to provide each department in the enterprise with timely reports on the effectiveness of their Internet-related business initiatives. Using this information, organizations can transform their web sites into key drivers of revenue and profitability. The NetAcumen Solution is available as an ASP service or a software license. NetAcumen is headquartered in Silicon Valley and can be reached at (650) 558-3800 or on the web at NetAcumen